Monday, July 26

driven to recycle

Over the years, I have learned a few things from Cap'n Kev. Some useful, some useless, it balances up.

You know how some people are driven by an ideology? Cap'n Kev's an environmentalist (some might say mentalist), and it's made him an obsessive recycler: he spends a large part of his life finding new homes for old stuff. Mostly he notices things in the street or in the wilderness, takes them home, and then offers them to people via phone or email.

I kind of admire his principled dedication, but sometimes he takes it too far. Soon after he got his first computer, he learned how to scan it for viruses. He phoned me up:

Kev: The virus scanner says it has found all these viruses on the disk. It's offering to delete them. What shall I do?

Me: Delete them.

Kev: But I don't want to waste them. Surely someone somewhere could use them?

Me: Delete them.

Next time I met him, he handed me a floppy disk. He had carefully copied all the viruses onto it for me, before deleting them from his machine.